Pantheon is the default desktop environment originally created for the elementary OS distribution. It is written from scratch using Vala and the GTK3 toolkit. With regards to usability and appearance, the desktop has some similarities with GNOME Shell and Mac OS X.

Contents

Installation

Pantheon is split into several packages which are available in the AUR. To get a minimal desktop interface, you may start by installing pantheon-session-bzrAUR. This will pull the following core components:

Additional Infos

Github repository

You will need to build at least 'bamf' from there because the AUR package is out of date and belongs to another TU who won't answer my plights to use my working PKGBUILD.
Building 'gala-bzr' and 'pantheon-files-bzr' from there is also recommended, pantheon-files-bzrAUR has wrong dependencies, but the current maintainer of the AUR packages whished to keep maintaining them and I did not want to abuse my superpowers.

Stable releases

Several of the listed packages have seen stable releases, it is recommended to use them when available, they are available on the GitHub repository and in the AUR.

Launching Pantheon

Via a Display Manager

Note: Currently, pantheon-session-bzrAUR uses a custom gnome-session with desktop files in /etc/xdg/autostart. This method will not work with the current version of GNOME (this is the same for the GNOME/Openbox session too).

Via .xinitrc

You can also use ~/.xinitrc with slim to launch the Pantheon shell. The following code will successfully launch a Pantheon session: